Concerned about changes to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure? Susan Hennessey of LawFare suggests the changes are frivolous – but are leading to something much more important:

First, a refresher on the previous state of affairs. Previously, Rule 41 included territorial venue provisions authorizing magistrate judges to issue warrants only within their district, except in a set of narrowly defined circumstances. Because prior to obtaining a warrant, authorities did not know the physical location of a computer using Tor or other anonymization services, it was unclear whether law enforcement could obtain such a warrant from any federal judge under those rules.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) features Vincent Price as a revenge killer, out to wipe out the surgical team who failed his wife in her moment of need. As an ornament to his efforts, each death will symbolize in some way the nine plagues of Egypt, although the last is not obviously completed.

I was mystified as to how a brass unicorn catapulted through the body of one victim was related to a plague, but perhaps I’ve already forgotten.

Then again, this movie is about obscurity, from deaths to the identity of the Price’s assistant; unless the editing for TV was quite destructive, the audience is never permitted to know her identity or role; she’s listed as Vulnavia in the credits, but I do not believe that name, or any other, is mentioned in the movie.

Much else is attributed airily to expertise, such as the reproduction of Vincent’s voice, himself the victim of an accident on the same day his wife died. Just how does he do that? Whose ashes were buried in his grave? How was his wife’s body, dead these 4 years, so well preserved so that he might reside next to her for eternity?

But this movie has a queerly detached feel to it. I think this is due to the fact that no great effort was made to make sympathetic characters. The surgical team is, for the most part, little more than moving targets; the police almost laughably incompetent; and Price and his assistant principally mysterious. We see events, we’re presented logic and motivations, but it’s almost academic, a quaint puzzle to be solved by the desperate chief surgeon and the police, who are principally harassed by a commissioner more interested in publicity than effectuality.

For all this, there is certainly some competency: the deaths are effective, sometimes chilling; Vincent, limited as he is by the script, still evokes some mild sympathy and even horror, his domicile full of his inventions calculated to put a chill of concern into any visitor.

Still, in the end, I felt a little empty. It failed to emotionally involve me, so I was not excited.

Israel appears to be mirroring certain regrettable aspects of the American political system. Mazal Mualem illuminates two instances, perhaps inadvertently, in this article for AL Monitor. First, she touches on extremism:

… the term “terrorist arson,” or as last week’s events were sometimes termed, “the arson intifada,” has since entered Israel’s public and political lexicon. As expected, these terms only boosted the right-wing coalition’s agenda.

James Hamblin writes about the Cuban health system in The Atlantic:

Cuba has long had a nearly identical life expectancy to the United States, despite widespread poverty. …

As a poor country, Cuba can’t afford to equivocate and waste money on health care. Much advanced technology is unavailable. So the system is forced instead to keep people healthy. This pressure seems to have created efficiency.

It’s largely done, as the BBC has reported, through an innovative approach to primary care. Family doctors work in clinics and care for everyone in the surrounding neighborhood. At least once a year, the doctor knocks on your front door (or elsewhere, if you prefer) for a check-up. More than the standard American ritual of listening to your heart and lungs and asking if you’ve noticed any blood coming out of you abnormally, these check-ups involve extensive questions about jobs and social lives and environment—information that’s aided by being right there in a person’s home.

Then the doctors put patients into risk categories and determine how often they need to be seen in the future. Unlike the often fragmented U.S. system where people bounce around between specialists and hospitals, Cuba fosters a holistic approach centered around on a relationship with a primary-care physician. Taxpayer investment in education about smoking, eating, and exercising comes directly from these family doctors—who people trust, and who can tailor recommendations.

A rather different approach to the problem of competition between nations. It used to be that humanity spent a lot of time and lives invading other countries and taking them over. That was our “keeping up with the Jones'” analog – or perhaps it’s the other way around. Nowadays, though, rather than depending on God to show the superiority of the ideology of the Motherland, now we compete on statistics: life expectancy, GDP, percentage of adult population with a college degree, to name a few.

And it appears Cuba takes this all very seriously, with a result that that they are comparable to US results in healthcare while spending about 10% of Americans per capita per annum. It’s quite impressive, of course – but to an American, to think that you’ll have a primary care doc assigned to you based on your neighborhood will seem the height of anti-Americanism – where is our choice! we shout, even as diseases we would never choose assail us. Indeed, we often choose not to visit a doctor or dentist for years at a time, convinced that we’re healthy – we talk about it at McDonald’s while eating the fad of the month, after all.

So the USA tries to compete on healthcare using a system that is seriously broken compared to a rational system like Cuba’s. And, so long as we value choice over statistics, we never will win. At least not until someone comes up with the magic pill that solves everything at a dime per dose. (Anyone remember Carter’s Little Liver Pills?)

So we should work on being honest, instead. Rather than insisting we have the best health system in the world – it’s only the most expensive – choice should be emphasized, even fetishized. And then personal responsibility should be part of it, too. Not taking care of that diabetes? Hmmmmmm. You’ll look great in this commercial.

But don’t put any money down on winning that “best healthcare system in the world” bet. Our results will never prove it.

A point unhighlighted is that of knowledge. There is a an underappreciated facet of the fetish of capitalism, and it is that certain intangible resources are infinite: time & knowledge come to mind. When it comes to capitalism & healthcare, there’s an assumption that, of course, there’ll be time to sort out which hospital offers the cheapest service, and that you’ll have time to take advantage of that – which leads me to wonder if I want healthcare that competes on price? This is not a whimsical afterthought, as the latter might be an example of the problem of knowledge, in this case that the domain of knowledge best applied to the problem of selecting medical services; Mr. Weissman’s proclamation that forcing hospitals to publish price lists will fix the entire healthcare problem is, I fear, naive. Only fools select product solely on the basis of price unless the question of quality is not relevant to the product, but sometimes the domain to apply can be unclear.

The Cubans, for all that they appear to be using coercion, are achieving greater efficiency by putting the most knowledgeable in charge of the effort: the primary care physician, who best knows medicine in at least the neighborhood, sees the entire neighborhood on a regular basis, and apparently tries to be as proactive as possible. I fear that American citizens, made up of mostly amateurs and in charge of their own health, will never match the efficiency of Cuba.

WHICH leads to the pivotal question: efficiency or liberty? The latter is one of our most sacred words, but this scenario should be a teaching moment, that no particular concept will ever have universal applicability. As we watch the GOP disassemble the ACA, aka Obamacare, an institution which has already shown greater efficiency than our free markets (another sacred word) on, at least, the statistic (twitched didn’t you?) of percentage of the population insured, it’s worth keeping in mind that society is not a machine that will always run better if only it’s lubricated with the sacred oil, blessed by God or by the proper economists, who are often treated like gods – although why the Kansan GOP elite wants to worship a fellow named Laffer leaves me a trifle nonplussed; but I should be gentler, as they’ve already made their fellow Kansans pay the price for their foolishness.

Society, whether American or not, is not some perfect machine which merely needs a bit of the proper oil now and then, but rather a creaking pile of rivets and gears, mismatched and rusty, shiny but soft metal so easily bent, predicated on assumptions concerning the needs of society that have never been well thought out, thinking that the inhabitants are rational creatures with reasonable information about the world. Yet those creatures, poor and slack as they are, rarely reach those standards, and so we see domestic violence; deceit; medical needs unmet by private corporations; frightened people deprived of their guns; people frightened of neighbors with guns; patronization on the left, met by equal force of loathing and ignorance on the right, making for a soup with a hell of a punch; & etc.

If it all worked so well, we wouldn’t have prisons.

As engineers know, you can’t have all the bells and whistles. You can’t use a Ferrarri to tow broken-down tractors back to the repair shop. We can decide to have choice, but we should know the price: replicated effort, emergency room visits for preventable illnesses, lives lost due to incompatible records; poverty; etc.

Or you can enforce systems which save more lives, at the cost of losing choice, losing liberty; and that’s the up-front costs. Libertarians worry about development of new meds if prices are government controlled, and the fear is not unreasonable. But then, it’s not clear that the free market is doing particularly well even now. But lack of choice obviates the advantage of the privileged, to some extent, and what if you’re stuck with the incompetent? Choice puts pressure on such people, to improve or get out; without choice, I would wonder if the governmental mechanisms would be strong enough to force them out.

Give me liberty! Give me efficiency!

I doubt you get to have both.

Heh.

© Victor Enrich, image from designboom.

More on this subject here.

Elon Musk may be the Pied Piper, but Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com is intent on throwing cold water all over him:

According to Musk as quoted in Electrek,

He said that the glass developed by Tesla for the solar roof tiles weigh “a third, a quarter and sometimes even a fifth” of other current concrete and ceramic roof solutions. Musk calculated that because of the weight and fragility of the current products, logistic costs and breakage are important parts of the total cost.

But that is not true of asphalt shingles, which are lighter, not fragile and easy to ship.

Now TreeHugger is no fan of asphalt shingles. They are, as I have noted before, the the cheapest and ugliest building enclosing material ever invented. But they are normal. What Elon Musk is selling is not normal or regular, but a comparable for a very high end niche product that is used for a tiny fraction of roofs on houses of very rich people, that costs between ten and twenty times the price of a normal, regular roof.

They are a normal and regular roof like a Tesla is normal and regular car.

Or, in other words, Elon didn’t do his homework.

There’s been quite a stream of countries joining the competition to become carbon neutral – and now it’s Morocco’s turn. First, they hosted COP22, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, where the Climate Vulnerable Forum Vision was composed and published. Here’s one small section:

• We strive to meet 100% domestic renewable energy production as rapidly as possible, while working to end energy poverty and protect water and food security, taking into consideration national circumstances.

Now Morocco’s working on meeting that goal. From Clean Technica:

Morocco, the host country of COP22, is one of these 48 countries. Over the past months and years, the World Future Council has worked with several stakeholders in the country, developing a policy roadmap to transition to 100% renewable electricity. With the CVF´s Marrakesh Vision, this roadmap can now serve as guidance for the new government to go faster and further and walk the talk.

We’ll see if they can pull it off.

(Sami Grover on Treehugger.com covers it, too.)

While some folks still cry out that the sky isn’t falling – or at least it’s not their fault – Ohio State University researchers are looking at the latest in Antarctica glacier shrinkage:

Source: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

A key glacier in Antarctica is breaking apart from the inside out, suggesting that the ocean is weakening ice on the edges of the continent.

The Pine Island Glacier, part of the ice shelf that bounds the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is one of two glaciers that researchers believe are most likely to undergo rapid retreat, bringing more ice from the interior of the ice sheet to the ocean, where its melting would flood coastlines around the world.

A nearly 225-square-mile iceberg broke off from the glacier in 2015, but it wasn’t until Ohio State University researchers were testing some new image-processing software that they noticed something strange in satellite images taken before the event.

In the images, they saw evidence that a rift formed at the very base of the ice shelf nearly 20 miles inland in 2013. The rift propagated upward over two years, until it broke through the ice surface and set the iceberg adrift over 12 days in late July and early August 2015.

They note this has been seen on the Greenland ice cap, and is signaled by the appearance of valleys in the ice cap. It is traced to the ocean infiltrating under the ice cap, and thus speeding the melting.  The upshot?

“The really troubling thing is that there are many of these valleys further up-glacier,” [OSU Professor Ian] Howat added. “If they are actually sites of weakness that are prone to rifting, we could potentially see more accelerated ice loss in Antarctica.”

And that could result in a 10 foot jump in average sea level.

Sitting here contemplating these observations, I suddenly had a vision of Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), he of no accomplishments, twenty years in the future finally acknowledging (as the sea pours into his shoes waders in the streets of Miami) that the climate is changing – and then announcing that, despite his catastrophic failure to listen to the warnings of scientists, he would be, once again, running for the nomination of his party, with no shame, and probably still no accomplishments.

I’d say it’s a chilling vision of the future, but obviously that would contradict today’s settled science. I suppose I’ll just have to say I’m all steamed up about it.

Gardner PD of Kansas were told there might be a mountain lion in the area, so they put out cameras.

More on this unique breed of mountain lion here.

In The New York Times, the work of political scientist Yascha Mounk is reviewed. This caught my attention:

Political scientists have a theory called “democratic consolidation,” which holds that once countries develop democratic institutions, a robust civil society and a certain level of wealth, their democracy is secure.

Which seems a little unlikely, as three variables are cited right in the definition – the institutions can be subverted, civil society can degenerate into extreme positions, possibly enabled by the wealth mentioned in the third position – and that last variable, wealth, can be affected by many things. To call such a democracy secure seems foolish from a logical point of view.

The article goes on to point out such examples as Venezuela, and I think it’s instructive to remember that the general citizenry, when the chips are down and they’re scraping bottom, isn’t going to cling to democracy absent a recent reminder of the chilling failures of the alternatives. The goal of any successful society isn’t, at baseline, to fulfill any particular ideology – it’s to be successful, to survive. If the citizenry is starving, or hopeless, or in some way dissatisfied, the ruling ideology is in trouble, and no amount of gesticulating to the God of Democracy will save it.

Quite possibly, the only successful treatment will be that most dreaded: experiencing the alternatives, possibly for generations.

So how is the United States doing? Mounk and his colleagues have developed an evaluation test.

According to the Mounk-Foa early-warning system, signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com may be letting his architecture background get away from him on this one:

Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, is a booming place. It has its charms, including beautiful rivers and lakes. Development is happening everywhere, including the Meixi Lake District to the west of town. Now NEXT architects have built the Lucky Knot, a beautiful new pedestrian bridge over the Dragon King Harbour River (and a highway) in the Meixi district.

To my eye, this is gaudy. I suspect that Lloyd is marveling at something in its architecture or engineering, rather than asking, Is this beautiful? Follow the link to NEXT, above, to see more pictures.

Manichaeism:

Manichaeism (/ˌmænᵻˈkiːɪzəm/; in Modern Persian آین مانی Āyin-e Māni; Chinese: 摩尼教; pinyin: MóníJiào; Xiao’erjing: موْنِ كِيَوْ) was a major religious movement that was founded by the Iranian prophet Mani (in Persian: مانی, Syriac: ܡܐܢܝ , Latin: Manichaeus or Manes; c. 216–276 AD) in the Sasanian Empire.

Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process which takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. Its beliefs were based on local Mesopotamian gnostic and religious movements. [Wikipedia]

Seen on the Rotten Tomatoes website:

A film that shows gender violence with an almost risible manichaeism and didacticism, and the information provided is visually cheesy.

Slovenia, in Europe, has made access to potable water a basic right. the guardian reports:

Source: Slovenia Holidays

Slovenia has amended its constitution to make access to drinkable water a fundamental right for all citizens and stop it being commercialised. …

“Water resources represent a public good that is managed by the state. Water resources are primary and durably used to supply citizens with potable water and households with water and, in this sense, are not a market commodity,” the article reads.

The centre-left prime minister, Miro Cerar, had urged lawmakers to pass the bill saying the country of two million people should “protect water – the 21st century’s liquid gold – at the highest legal level”.

“Slovenian water has very good quality and, because of its value, in the future it will certainly be the target of foreign countries and international corporations’ appetites.

“As it will gradually become a more valuable commodity in the future, pressure over it will increase and we must not give in,” Cerar said.

A right wing party abstained from the vote, calling it politically motivated. While the left parties celebrate, I wonder if it’s a good thing to place control of such a valuable resource in the hands of government. After all, all political parties think you’re as clean as the driven snow. If they ever reach the point of water rationing, how will they approach it?

Of course, a commercial controlling interest would also raise the hairs on my neck.

University of Bristol scientists have achieved one of those commercial holy grails – converting waste into something useful:

New technology has been developed that uses nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery. A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current.

No doubt many readers have already heard of Hugleikur Dagsson, but I just ran across him and like it.

Here’s more.

On Lawfare April Doss offers an affirmation of an audit of the results in the Presidential election:

[The computer and election experts’] evidence and arguments are well-documented elsewhere, so I won’t rehash them here. But it is important to note that none of these experts’ opinions are tied to the political fortunes of Republicans or Democrats. These are merely computer and election security experts offering their view that there’s some evidence of a problem. While Nate Silver and other statisticians have posited other counter-explanations for the evidence, it is to be expected that different disciplines focus on different dimensions of a problem and offer different explanation. Silver’s theory that demographics and not hacking or computer error is responsible for the deviation is number is certainly plausible, perhaps even likely. But the presence or absence of other possible explanations are not a reason to not perform an audit. When faced with a potential cybersecurity problem, the purpose of the audit is to confirm or eliminate that possibility, not because it is the definitive explanation. The voices suggesting that we don’t need an audit because the results are probably correct are missing the point.

It’s not that the probability of corruption of the election systems is high, it’s that there is a chance of corruption, and that the cost of being wrong, in this particular case, of even leaving the suspicion that our computer systems were manipulated, is too high. We need to retain confidence in our election systems, or throw them out (as I’ve more or less advocated) for either better qualified computer systems, or return to old-fashioned human systems. Speaking of Nate Silver’s (well, actually Carl Bialik and Rob Arthur) reaction on FiveThirtyEight:

Without a recount, all we can do for now is look for any meaningful difference in the three states named in the New York article between votes in counties that used paper ballots and votes in ones that used machines. That quickly crossed Michigan off the list: The entire state uses paper ballots, which are read by optical scanners. So we couldn’t compare results by type of voting in that state. Instead, we checked the six other states with a margin between Clinton and Trump of less than 10 percentage points that use a mix of paper and machine voting: Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia.

For each county in those states, we looked at Clinton’s vote share and whether it was associated with the type of voting system the county used, based on voting-system data compiled by a nonprofit electoral-reform group called Verified Voting and 2016 vote data from Dave Leip’s U.S. Election Atlas and ABC News. It doesn’t make much sense, though, to just look at raw vote counts and how they differed, because we know there are many factors that affect how a county voted, both in those states and everywhere else around the country. So we separated out two of the main factors that we know drove differences in voting results: the share of each county’s population age 25 and older with a college degree, and the share of the county that is non-white.

We found no apparent correlation between voting method and outcome in six of the eight states, and a thin possible link between voting method and results in Wisconsin and Texas. However, the two states showed opposite results: The use of any machine voting in a county was associated with a 5.6-percentage-point reduction in Democratic two-party vote share in Wisconsin but a 2.7-point increase in Texas, both of which were statistically significant. Even if we focus only on Wisconsin, the effect disappears when we weight our results by population. More than 75 percent of Wisconsin’s population lives in the 23 most populous counties, which don’t appear to show any evidence for an effect driven by voting systems. To have effectively manipulated the statewide vote total, hackers probably would have needed to target some of these larger counties. When we included all counties but weighted the regression by the number of people living in each county, the statistical significance of the opposite effects in Wisconsin and Texas both evaporated.

Sami Grover on Treehugger.com gives an encouraging overview on coal consumption, ending with an opinion on China:

There is one big question mark around the future of coal, and that’s China. Analysts and activists alike have been astounded by how fast coal use has plateaued in China, years ahead of schedule—driven in part by domestic concerns over air quality, and in part by a slow down in the economy. The country’s climate leadership may also step up further if the US cedes its position on the global stage. That said, China is still building a huge amount of new coal capacity. What’s interesting, however, is how much of the world’s attention on these additions is not on the pollution they will cause, but the fact that they may become rapidly obsolete. In fact, according to this report over at Fortune, the country may be throwing away as much as $500 billion on unnecessary power plants which will never recoup their value.

He didn’t address new coal power plants, however. Here’s the latest predictions on coal consumption from the U.S. Energy Information Administration:

Throughout the projection, the top three coal-consuming countries are China, the United States, and India, which together account for more than 70% of world coal use. China accounted for 50% of world coal consumption in 2012, and its coal use continues to grow through 2025 in the Reference case before beginning a decline along with slower overall growth in energy consumption and the implementation of policies addressing air pollution and climate change. In 2040, China’s share of world coal consumption falls to 46%. As a result of the slower growth and decline in China’s coal use, the world coal share of total primary energy consumption declines steadily, from 28% in 2012 to 22% in 2040—in contrast to its sustained growth from 24% in 2001 to 29% in 2009, primarily as a result of increasing coal use in China. Total U.S. coal consumption per year, which peaked in 2007, remains largely unchanged from 2012 to 2040 without the CPP but declines significantly with the CPP. Although coal consumption in China does not change much from 2012 to 2040, coal use in India and the other countries of non-OECD Asia continues to rise. India’s coal use surpasses the United States total around 2030, and its share of world coal consumption grows from 8% in 2012 to 14% in 2040.

The Sunday night, post-fencing tournament, “I cannot but drool now” movie is Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995), another in this long-lived franchise. Once again, we have Godzilla, this time literally steaming himself to death because his nuclear reactor heart is slowly going critical; add to that a positively spectacular case of shingles, and it’s fairly understandable why he’s extra crabby in this episode. His home of Bass Island is gone, his son, Junior, has transformed into the final stage of the Godzilla species (possibly a species of Megalosaur) and is running around on his own, and micro-oxygen has created Destoroyah, a monster capable of turning into a little army of small monsters or assembling into the big monster. He also gets to have some lightning effects.

Yeah.

The special effects run the gamut. On the low end, Destoroyah, especially in component form, is positively awful. In assembled form, it’s not much of an improvement. In some of the Tokyo scenes we observed a marked lack of panic in a city that was supposedly under evacuation order, leading to the supposition that Tokyo residents have become remarkably blasé concerning kaiju running loose in the city. In our own metropolitan area, we imagined such traffic reports as “kaiju backup on I-94 west bound at Snelling,” but we’re not certain that Midwestern stolidness would sustain the moment in an adequate manner.

On the other end, Godzilla with shingles was remarkably effective; Junior caught in the clutches of Destoroyah lingered on the line between awesome and silly. In one shot I appreciated the allusion to Goya’s The Colossus, and it was rather well done.

Story? “Where’s Godzilla? Where’s Godzilla now? There’s trouble in the industrial section! Where’s Junior? Oh, what’s that? Where’s Junior? Where’s Godzilla? Godzilla’s been frozen with lasers! Oh, poor Tokyo! Junior’s dead! Godzilla’s melting! Oh, no! NUCLEAR POWER IS BAD!”

The last one was explicitly stated, no doubt for the defective members of the audience.

Yeah. It was good for a drooly night. If you’re functional, though, don’t waste your time on this drip of a movie.

Arabesque:

The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of “surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils” or plain lines, often combined with other elements. [Wikipedia]

There are other definitions, relating to ballet & music. Seen in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Carlo Rovelli, pp 67-68:

Within the immense ocean of galaxies and stars we are in a remote corner; amid the infinite arabesques of forms that constitute reality, we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes.

Three remarks.

1. Arabesque is an immensely difficult word for a touch typist.
2. It is unclear whether this definition is applicable or not.
3. I didn’t finish reading the chapter containing the quote. No doubt this is reflective of a personal failing, and not of a defect in the author.

CNN Headline:

He’s back to rigging

Referring to Trump’s claim that he lost the popular vote because of voter fraud, despite there being no evidence of same.

Are we going to have the spectacle of a President disrespected by the mainstream media, while only loved by the “alt-right”? Is it really appropriate to disrespect a President this openly?

Your Presidential Ball-peen Hammer from MSC Industrial

I think it is. It may take a ball-peen hammer to get it through his head that many of his proposed candidates for various positions are not quality people, and, in fact, some exhibit un-American qualities inappropriate to their proposed positions. But I do worry about our society further fragmenting, rather than coming together as we should if we’re going to even have quality candidates to consider – rather than power-seekers with nothing more than a mouth to run and an ache to be in charge.

Hillary Clinton may turn out to be the last truly qualified candidate this country will ever see at this rate.

Fugacity:

In chemical thermodynamics, the fugacity of a real gas is an effective partial pressure which replaces the mechanical partial pressure in an accurate computation of the chemical equilibrium constant. It is equal to the pressure of an ideal gas which has the same chemical potential as the real gas. For example, nitrogen gas (N₂) at 0 °C and a pressure of P = 100 atm has a fugacity of f = 97.03 atm.^[1] This means that the chemical potential of real nitrogen at a pressure of 100 atm is less than if nitrogen were an ideal gas; the value of the chemical potential is that which nitrogen as an ideal gas would have at a pressure of 97.03 atm.

Fugacities are determined experimentally or estimated from various models such as a Van der Waals gas that are closer to reality than an ideal gas. The ideal gas pressure and fugacity are related through the dimensionless fugacity coefficient φ. [Wikipedia]

Sighted in Jack Vance’s The Palace of Love:

Some of my guests have complained of a gentle melancholy which hangs in the air; I agree that the mood exists. The explanation, I believe, arises from the fugacity of beauty, the tragic pavanne to which all of us step.

More cross-cultural references.

And that’s enough of Irish people indulging culinary impulses.

From the flow of mail coming through the Internet is thunderstorm asthma. What is it? From Wikipedia:

Thunderstorm asthma is the triggering of an asthma attack by environmental conditions directly caused by a local thunderstorm. It has been proposed that during a thunderstorm, pollen grains can absorb moisture and then burst into much smaller fragments with these fragments being easily dispersed by wind. However, there is no experimental evidence for the proof of this theory.^[1] While larger pollen grains are usually filtered by hairs in the nose, the smaller pollen fragments are able to pass through and enter the lungs, triggering the asthma attack.^[2][3][4][5] A pollen grain is a single cell.

And what caused this mail? The fate of some unfortunates in Melbourne, Australia:

A fifth person has died and six people remain in intensive care — four of them critical — following Melbourne’s thunderstorm asthma outbreak on Monday.

Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the latest victim had died in the past 24 hours, but did not release details on their age or sex.

The department said hospitals were continuing to treat 20 people for a number of related conditions aside from those in intensive care.

More than 8,500 people have received hospital treatment since Monday’s outbreak.

That is quite a few people to add to the normal load of folks seeking hospital care.

It’s situations like these that entirely blunt my non-existent ambition to be a politician. From Senator Al Franken’s (MN-D) website:

Following efforts from Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, along with Representatives Collin Peterson, Tim Walz and Rick Nolan, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced new plans to help dairy producers and families in need in 2017. Low milk prices have resulted in sharply reduced incomes for U.S. dairy farmers, which is placing our nation’s dairy industry in a vulnerable position. In July, Klobuchar, Franken, Peterson, Walz, and Nolan urged the department to use its authority to take action to protect the nation’s dairy farmers from further crisis and aid the expansion and maintenance of domestic farmers. To build on support given by the USDA in August, today the USDA announced plans to purchase $20 million of cheese for food banks and pantries across the nation to assist families in need through USDA nutrition assistance programs.

I look at this and see the “creative destruction” beloved of libertarians; the free market sending its waves of destruction across a nation. As prices go up, more farmers enter the market; as prices go down, farmers crash and burn. And then the government gets involved, so that a situation that might be described as great for consumers (the obese lot of them) is characterized as a catastrophe for the other side of the pipeline. As much as I do have suspicions when the government gets involved, my sense is that the food supply comes before doctrinaire economic theory; it’s either guaranteed, or there’s rioting in the street. So the dance continues, but it’s never clear to me the next step in this polka.

Back in 2009, NBC News reported on low milk prices in Belgium:

Belgian farmers sprayed 790,000 gallons of fresh milk onto their fields Wednesday, furious over the low milk prices they say are bankrupting farmers.

Milk farmers’ groups said world prices had sunk so much they are having to sell milk at half their production costs, leaving more and more farmers unable to pay their bills.

To highlight their desperation, about 300 tractors dragged milk containers through plowed fields in southern Belgium, dumping a day’s worth of milk production in that region.

“It is a scandal to dump this, but we have to realize what the situation is,” said Belgian farm leader Erwin Schoepges. “We need a farm revolt.”

The crisis has driven many EU farmers into a “milk strike,” with thousands refusing to deliver milk to the industrial dairy conglomerates that produce anything from skimmed milk to processed cheese.

Romuald Schaber, the president of the European Milk Board farmers’ group, said up to half the milk farmers in some areas were refusing to deliver their milk and predicted the first shortages could hit some supermarkets as early as next week.

This would be politically disastrous here in the States.